How Ludus came to be.
Ludus started where most tools start — someone needed it and it didn't exist. Here's how a federal red team operator, tired of burning 90-day engagements on sysadmin work, ended up building the cyber range platform now running in 250+ orgs around the world.
The job was supposed to be hacking.
Erik spent his early career in offensive cyber and transitioned to a federal red team — 90-day engagements with stakeholders watching, on timelines that didn't move. The work, in theory, was offensive.
In practice, the first third of every 90-day window was lab plumbing. A custom domain. The right Windows version. Telemetry stacks matched to whatever the customer was running. A fresh C2 ready by morning. Snapshots that wouldn't drift between Friday and Monday.
He'd been hired to do offense — and he didn't want to be a sysadmin. But the operator paid to exercise adversary craft was, more often than not, sysadmin-ing his way through a lab build before the real work could start.
“Ninety days to deliver, and I'd burn the first thirty being a sysadmin. That wasn't the job I was hired for.”
So he built the tool he needed.
Ludus started as a personal project — a way to spin up a realistic enterprise range with a single command, repeat it on demand, and tear it down without leaving artifacts. The pieces were already there: Proxmox under the hood, Ansible roles for every layer, a clean API for everything else.
What Ludus added was a discipline. Templates instead of internal knowledge. Roles instead of one-off scripts. Reproducible state instead of “works on my box.” The creation, maintenance, and adaptation of a cyber range turned into something you could fit between meetings, not a week-long detour from the real work.
The first version ran on a single server in a homelab. The second version ran a federal red team.
From a side project to mission-critical work.
What started as one operator's escape hatch is now the platform federal red teams, AI labs, and Fortune 500 security orgs use to ship serious work. Offensive tools come with their test range built in. Customer engagements get their own clean infrastructure. AI agents get a realistic sandboxed enterprise to operate inside.
Ludus is quickly becoming the standard for tool testing, red team infrastructure, AI training data, and any cyber use case that demands a real environment without real risk.
The mission hasn't changed: give operators their time back.